Linux Blog

At an average of around $20 per DVD* most can’t afford to have any of their DVDs lost, stolen or broken. Backing them up is a touchy subject depending on who you talk to, but here is how to do it anyway.

Backing up a DVD on Linux used to be much harder than it is with K9Copy. No more flaky DVD Shrink crashes under wine. K9Copy takes the hassles out of creating backups of your DVDs under Linux. As the name implies it is KDE software but works well under gnome provided you have the needed libraries installed.

It has many options to backup and really is pretty comparable in functionality to the infamous DVD Shrink for Windows. Take a look at the screenshots and give it a try yourself:

Since we are now in the second month of 2009 I figured it would be a good time to follow up on My Goals for 2009. I have not made much progress on my goals, but hey any progress is progress right? This post is my list of things that I do not want to repeat in 2009, either from 2008 or before. Only the first item is non-technical and this list is not quite as long as my list of things I want to achieve in 2009. I’m sure I’ll think of more as the year goes on. Again, its not an all-inclusive list and I hopefully won’t have to come and amend this document too quickly, if at all, oh who am I kidding I should probably add to this before I even post it.

We’ll start off what happened to me on new years eve 2008. To say the least I got very drunk, meaning that I was so hung over that I couldn’t function. Therefore I spent the rest of the day in bed, I’ll try not to make a repeat of this in 2009 on any account. New years eve or not, what a way to start the new year.

I’m pretty sure that I did this one in 2008, if not I’ve done it in the past and do not want to repeat it. It involves some personal data and a mistyped command, resulting in data loss. What about backups? Well it doesn’t help if the mistyped command was intended to make a backup of the data rather than destroy it.

Working on production machines. This is a touchy subject, sometimes there are times you HAVE to work with production machines, there is just no way around it. What I aim to do, is not work on them as often. For example, I can copy a portion of a live database to my development machine and work on it from there rather than just copy the database or table on a production machine. This way I will prevent locking up tables with a poorly written query and perhaps avoid a restore from backup or rather large oh $#@! moment.

I don’t want to run a certain distribution for my servers in 2009. I’ll keep the distribution anonymous in this one but those that know me will know one of my dirty little secrets. It’s not them, its me. It involves a bleeding edge distribution that gets updated every six months or so. In short it shouldn’t be used in a production environment. I wasn’t involved in the decision to run this distribution but I will be involved in solving this nightmare.

To end this list I give you the epic chmod 755 -R while in the root directory. I don’t think this one needs any more explanation.